Muse back!
December 28, 2006 / Thursday
I Really Need To Think These Things Through First
Last night, at 2AM, I decided it was finally time to get off my ass and set up my wireless network to use encryption. For whatever lazy reasons, it'd previously been using MAC address filtering with no encryption, which, ironically, is the higher maintenance route, since I had to go into router admin and add a MAC address for every new device that needed access. Besides, after several years (!) I was running out of MAC address fields in the admin interface.
Switching over was easy. I created a key, saved the changes to my router, and configured my laptop to use it. Done, done, and done. I then decided that MAC address filtering was redundant, and that it was time to clean up the sorely outdated list on my router. I deleted all the addresses in the list, and as I stared at the dropdown that told me I still had MAC address filtering enabled, I thought, "I should change that," and clicked on the save button.
Woops.
Not to fear! I figured I'd just plug in directly and make the change. Sadly, my router didn't want to cooperate; it refused to give me an IP. I tried to give myself a static one, but it refused that too. I then tried to restore the router to factory settings, but the reset button didn't work. After another half hour of searching for paper documentation and hooking up directly to the modem to find some answers, I spent another minute pushing on the little reset button that didn't seem to do anything, and was finally able to get in through the cable and turn off MAC address filtering.
Hooray, I was up and running again. Time for bed.
This morning, I needed to download something onto my desktop. I knew that I'd have to update the key on that machine, and figured it'd be a piece of cake. It would have been, too, if I hadn't made that machine headless when I moved rooms a week or so ago. I connect to it over RDC/VNC, and, well, if it's not on the network I can't exactly do that, can I?
I'm such a genius.
December 28, 2006 11:23 AM | Geek
Comments
Nothing quite like watching a small plastic box blink its little lights at you in a completely mocking way, is there?
Posted by: Mike at December 28, 2006 01:00 PM
Yes, but fortunately I had a just-long-enough monitor cable and some extra keyboards in my box of random computer stuff handy. :)
Posted by: Viv at December 28, 2006 01:04 PM